


Senseless

by anorchidisnotaflower



Series: When All Else Fails [5]
Category: Fight Club (1999), Fight Club - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Domestic, Explicit Language, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Third Person, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-24 16:34:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15634530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anorchidisnotaflower/pseuds/anorchidisnotaflower
Summary: "He remembers—tries not to for a second, but the alcohol convinces him—staying up all night and feeling the same way, tossing beer bottles and playing golf with factories and sitting too close and wondering if maybe—"In which Marla tries to help, and the Narrator moves on. Sort of.





	Senseless

After a few weeks, he’s out of the hospital, and after a few months, he’s out of rehab and back in heaven where he belongs. It’s the same as he remembers, but this time he isn’t the confused, willing mess he was before. This time he’s quiet, says yes and no with the same tone of voice, takes whatever they give him without a word.

The men who work there, the men with scars on top of scars, look at his shell and think, was this really him? It can’t be.

At first they think they can persuade him—whisper their plans in his ear, sneak notes through the door to his room, place coded messages underneath his pill cup.

But when they ask him for an answer, for a response, he says nothing. He stares at them. To one young man he asks, Can you please leave me alone?

They stop bothering, then. They look at the man in front of them and think, no, he’s not _him_. Not really. Not anymore. He has a split personality, after all. That’s what it says on his chart. He’s an imposter, a faker, someone who stole the title of Tyler Durden right from under our noses. The real Tyler is still out there, still walking night and day, still changing his face every few weeks. He’s out there.

They have their stories. They don’t need the real thing anymore. They never did.

\---

The doctors ask him, "Have you seen him since the crash?"

He says no.

They ask, "Did he tell you to steal the car?"

He says no.

They ask, "Were you trying to run away?"

He says no.

They ask, "Was he driving the car?"

He says, I don’t know.

\---

They’re all tired of him after a few months. Staring at nothing, doing what he’s told, not telling them the full truth, the truth they’ve already decided for him.

So they look through his file, try calling someone, _anyone_ to come and get him. The first number they try gets a whine and a pop—it belonged to some decrepit house. No answer.

They try the second and third numbers, getting a long explanation that ends in learning she’s dead on one (the mother) and reaching a full voicemail box on the other (the father).

Then they try the last number, and that gets them a hoarse voice and a long, long sigh (the girlfriend?).

She’s over in an hour, decked out in a loose, red leather jacket and a drooping black dress. Her shoes are much too high and much too big, and there’s smoke spilling out of her lips like a chimney fire, but they let her in. She’s the only chance they’ve got of getting rid of him.

They roll him in and he barely looks up. She doesn’t say anything, either, but the smoke sputters for a second.

She takes his chair and rolls him out, and that’s the last they ever see of them.

\---

Home is Marla's old apartment, and he really isn’t surprised to find it looks the same. Dildo on the dresser, plastic on the mattress. He limps to the bureau and sits down, hard. Marla sits across from him on the bed and tries to piece together what little she can from how he looks. They told her nothing, really—car crash, still crazy, not speaking much.

She asks him, “Did you crash on purpose?”

He shrugs. Winces.

She looks at the way he’s holding his knee. “Did they give you a cane or anything?”

He shakes his head, once.

Marla reaches a hand out to cover his shaking one, and he stills under her touch.

“Did you ever… did you ever love me? Either of you?”

He finally meets her eyes, and now she knows he doesn’t have to answer her. She gets it. She always did.

Marla gets up with a huff. “Well, we can’t just sit here in our own shit all day. Let’s get you up, let’s get a cane, and let’s get the fuck out of here.”

He doesn’t smile, but it comes close enough.

\---

Marla lets him sleep next to her, and he tries not to make it too weird.

He does anyway, but she doesn’t seem to mind.

“I’m not going to ask you for sex if that’s what you’re afraid of,” she says.

He sputters. I didn’t think—

She sighs. “Yeah you did. As long as you don’t mind me tossing and turning, we’re good.”

He agrees, and the arrangement is settled. In the morning, he finds her arms slung around his back. She snores. Loudly.

He doesn’t really mind.

\---

He’s off the cane in a month or two, but there’s still a certain stiffness in the way he holds his left leg. Marla notices, but she doesn’t say anything—just comes home with a bottle of aspirin that she flings at his head. He doesn't manage to duck in time, and she doesn't let him hear the end of it for weeks.

He goes for walks sometimes, just to get out of the one room. Just to breathe a little bit. His leg kills him some days, but he likes the repetition, the feeling of ground beneath his feet. Something real to hold onto.

One day he finds an ad for a job at the local library stuck crookedly to a telephone pole. He looks at it for a moment before ripping it off and stuffing it into his pocket.

He leaves it under his pillow. Just in case.

\---

“Hey,” Marla says one night, pulling at his sleeve. “Let’s get a drink.”

He frowns. I don’t really drink anymore.

She tugs him right up out of his seat and shoves him toward the dresser. “No, fuck you, not taking no for an answer. You need a shirt.”

For what, he asks.

She starts rummaging through the drawers, throwing tights and shirts and underwear askew. He dodges a flying sock.

“You,” she says, punctuating each word with an airborne article of clothing, “need to get laid.”

He blinks. I—I don’t—

“You absolutely do, so shut your mouth and _listen_ to me for once,” she replies.

Marla pulls a tight-looking shirt out of the pile and holds it aloft. He examines it, wondering briefly where Marla got it, before shaking his head.

“I am not trusting your opinion on this,” she says, pulling at his sleeve again. “You always had terrible taste in clothes. Both of you.”

He laughs at that, a little bit desperate.

She tugs at his sleeve again. “C’mon, we don’t have all night. Take your shirt off.”

And he does, feeling a strange reversal flickering through the room.

\---

He has to admit—getting this drunk is nice.

It means losing feeling in his bad leg for a bit and focusing instead on the colorful lights splitting the ceiling of the club, the polished sheen of the floor, the condensation dripping down his glass to soak his fingers.

It reminds him of someone. He remembers—tries not to for a second, but the alcohol convinces him—staying up all night and feeling the same way, tossing beer bottles and playing golf with factories and sitting too close and wondering if maybe—

Marla appears. “Hey, asshole.”

He slowly meets her eyes.

She sighs. “Stop moping into your drink and get out there!”

She splays her arm for emphasis and “there,” he sees, is a dance floor right in front of him filled with people grinding and pulsing in the dim, scattered light.

Marla shoves him out, snatching his drink out of his hand and downing it before he can say, wait.

She smiles. “Don’t be shy.”

He frowns, looking out, and suddenly realizes the floor is filled primarily with men.

Wait a— he starts, because then a blond man with a sharp grin dances into view. He has dark eyes and straight teeth but it’s close enough, because then the blond is pulling him in and yelling in his ear, “Hey there.”

Three songs later they’re in a corner of the club, teeth and tongues clashing like either of them know what they’re doing. He feels more sober than he has in a long time.

In between breaths, he thinks, this man wants me.

He thinks, it’s so nice to kiss someone who isn’t as intangible as smoke.

He thinks, I could get used to this. If I tried.

But the blond breaks off, breathing heavily, and murmurs, “Let me take you home.”

And he agrees, but only just.

\---

He wakes up in an empty, small bed he doesn’t recognize. Blinking, he pulls himself up, feeling the first waves of nausea, before noticing the floral print shirt on the floor.

There’s the sound of footsteps just outside, and a smell like frying eggs.

He doesn’t want to hope but he does anyway, and he hates himself for it.

The blond—Derek—is nice enough, and Derek smiles when he walks out, bleary and dazed.

“Mornin’,” Derek says, and he wonders (briefly) why Derek isn’t wearing a bathrobe.

He tries to smile back, fails. Morning.

Derek serves up eggs—fried to perfection—and he can’t stop thinking about toast.

He wishes he could be nicer, but Derek doesn’t seem to mind. He’s chatty, understanding, kind. He even makes coffee.

They leave on a decent note—Derek waving him off as he walks out the door, gaze lingering.

He wants to call Derek back, to start something. Start _anything_.

But everything is just that little bit broken, everything is just that little bit skewed, like a mirror no one can repair.

\---

Marla tries, at least. They go drinking sometimes and he never hooks up again, but she seems to find a partner in anyone her eye catches. Sometimes they come back to the apartment with her, but he doesn’t mind, not really. It’s not plaster dust in his hair and damp magazines around his ears.

He goes for his walks late at night instead while Marla is busy, and he finds he still likes the city better at night.

After a while he starts to get tired of walking and sitting and waiting for Marla to come home, so he calls the library’s number. Somehow he lands an interview, and somehow he gets along with the elderly woman behind the desk, and somehow he gets the job.

The second Marla hears she launches into teasing. “So instead of sitting here all day,” she says, sprawled out on the bed, “you’re going to sit in a dusty room full of books instead?”

Yeah, he says.

“You’re fucking weird,” she pronounces, sitting up. “One minute you’re some nine-to-five support group addict. The next you’re a bomb-wielding sociopath with a Jekyll and Hyde complex. Now you’re a librarian?”

He shrugs. I like to keep busy.

Marla cackles, falling back against the bed.

But being at the library starts to work for him. He likes the way books feel in his grip, the smell of paper and old ink. That tactile presence grounds him. Something real.

He’s not too sure _what_ Marla does every day. Maybe she’s clearing out laundromats, maybe she’s mooching off her many dates, or maybe she’s actually working somewhere.

He finds that it doesn’t really matter to him anymore, as long as she comes home.

She always does.

\---

One day he arrives home with a withered spider plant that was abandoned in the library’s back window.

Marla, smoke pouring out of her mouth, says, “That plant’s gonna die faster than me.”

He sets it in the small window and waters it anyway. After a few days, the ends of its leaves perk up a bit.

Marla eyes it one morning. “That thing always looks like it’s ready to give up.”

He hums. At least some of it is green.

“I guess you’re right,” she replies. She coughs, hacking into her fist, and he notices the way she pulls her hand toward her body, out of sight.

He wants to ask, and he knows she would tell him, but he doesn’t. They’re both cowards.

The spider plant gets a friend in a sad cactus a few weeks later.

Marla rolls her eyes. “I can’t believe I managed to turn you into my grandmother.”

He doesn’t say anything, but she can read the smirk on his face well enough.

The windowsill becomes a bit crowded, but it’s green and real and alive. 

\---

A year later, Marla leaves.

“This is your space now more than mine,” she frowns, waving a hand. “So I need my own. Gotta get out of this goddamn city before I die in our hallway.”

He realizes, then, that he likes Marla, still, really likes her. Before she walks out he captures her in a hug.

She stiffens, then pats his shoulder. “Thank you too,” she mumbles.

He wants to tell her, to ask her, to plead with her. He’s not sure what.

He lets her go instead. He knows it’s what she wants.

Don’t cause too much trouble, he says.

“I will,” she replies.

He never hears from her again, and he hopes beyond anything that that cough didn’t kill her, even if it’s useless to do it.

\---

He spends the next few years painting and refurbishing and fixing, picking away at Marla’s old apartment until it looks a little like a home.

He doesn’t browse IKEA, doesn’t fill the place with shit he doesn’t need, but he tinkers. He straightens the crooked bureau, readjusts the broken window latch, makes more room for his plants in the now-clean kitchen. He treats himself to a new bed—no plastic cover.

He goes to work every day except weekends and comes home. He gets to know his co-workers, and they try to get to know him. He gets a reputation for being the quietest person at the desk, and he starts to pick up some library science. He studies a bit, and they give him more to do. He reads at home sometimes. He waters his plants.

He forgets, slowly, that he ever was somebody, even if he still gets glances in local cafes or at work from men with splintered eyes and bandaged noses.

Eventually the looks stop, too, until he thinks maybe, maybe everyone forgot. Maybe no one cares.

But he still comes home to an empty apartment each night and checks behind every corner. Just in case.

And soon enough the waiting game becomes too much for me, too, because goddamn, someone fixing up everything just for you is a little bit romantic.

He doesn’t seem at all surprised when I show up in the tiny kitchen, holding a strand of the spider plant between my fingers.

Morning, he says.

“Morning,” I reply.

We stop talking in words and I wait for the inevitable, the thought that’ll flicker behind both our eyelids: _You should leave. This will never work._

But, fuck, I’m nothing if not scared of him. He thinks I always have all the cards in my hands but I never, ever did with him, because even if I laughed in his face I wouldn’t know what he’d do next.

He’s the scariest person I know and I might just love him to death.

I hear his bare feet padding across the tiles toward me, and my fingers tighten their grip on the plant leaves.

He breathes in. Tyler.

I hate what him saying my name does to me.

Tyler, he says again. It comes out so quiet I can’t tell if it’s a question, an answer, or a plea. Maybe it’s none of those things.

“I came back,” I say. The words feel stupid after they come out of my mouth, but I don’t know which words will fix this fucking mess.

Yeah, he says. Of course.

I want to ask him: Did you ever figure out what you wanted? What have you been doing since I’ve been gone? Can you ever forgive me?

I say, instead, “Where’d you get all the plants?”

I can feel him shrug. Library. They were dying.

“All of them?” I scoff.

The librarian doesn’t really have a green thumb, he says.

I laugh, and there’s a kind of sick desperation in it.

Suddenly, I feel his face press up against my back, and I try not to react.

I breathe in once, sharply, anyway.

Someday, he tells me, face buried in my shoulder blades, one of us will leave again.

I try to laugh again, try to tell him, “That won’t happen,” but I don’t.

I say, “We made it back this time."

He doesn’t reply for a moment, but I can feel his breath on my back, his hesitation, his want.

No one can ever tell me this, right here, isn’t real.

Just as I think I’m going to have to turn around and beg him to come back and forgive me, I feel a pair of arms wrap around my waist.

I missed you so fucking much, he murmurs into my back. I feel the hum of his voice all the way down to my toes.

I let go of the plant and wrap my fingers around his.

I forgave you a long time ago, I whisper back.

For once, we are speaking only in truths.

I turn around, and when he kisses me, something in the world realigns, and I (and he) are left senseless.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who read any part of this series. You all are the reason I keep writing, and knowing you're out there makes my day every day.
> 
> Of course I had to write a happy ending for these two! Leaving it on a sad note _was_ fitting, though, so if you'd like, _Kiss Your Knuckles_ can be seen as the ending. This is just a fun, angsty, fix-it epilogue.
> 
> The end of this series doesn't mean I'm done writing for _Fight Club_ , though -- I've got a couple of AU ideas floating around, so we'll see what happens.
> 
> Thanks again for sticking around!


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